How a secret European language ‘made a rabbit’ and survived
psyche.co
psyche.co
I love the ‘Chinese whispers’ between languages in this example.
“The idiom derives from the Yiddish idiom Zores und Jokreszeit (time of need and price increases) and was assimilated to the similar-sounding German expression Sauregerkenzeit (cucumber time)” quote from: The Language of Thieves: The Story of Rotwelsch and One Family’s Secret History by Martin Puchner (who also wrote the article).
> Various reasons have been suggested for naming the game after the Chinese, but there is no concrete explanation.[5] One suggested reason is a widespread English fascination with Chinese culture in the 18th and 19th centuries - including that now known as Orientalism. Another proposed theory is that English people of the 19th century believed that Chinese people spoke in a way that was deliberately unintelligible, thus in their minds associating the Chinese language with confusion and incomprehensibility. An additional explanation is the commonplace observation that when two people, such as English and Chinese speakers, try to communicate with each other in their own language, the result is often confusion, and equally often amusing to both parties. A further theory is that the game stems from the supposed confused messages created when a message was passed verbally from tower to tower along the Great Wall of China.[5]
Out of curiosity, do you cringe when you hear the phrase "it's Greek to me"?
Thinking a race of people are deliberately confusing and unintelligible isn't racism?
I said minor nitpick. No I don't think "it's greek to me" holds the same prejudice at all. Perhaps closer to saying "excuse my French" after swearing (also cringe worthy).
If "chinese whispers" has racist tones, surely implying a language is nearly unintelligible must be the same.
Chinese whispers the name of a game that information is lost/changed/confused (aka Telephone) as so helpfully pointed out above comes from the idea that Chinese are deliberately confusing and unintelligible.
I was merely pointing it out to raise awareness... and tried to do so without crediting any malice to the OP.
"He gave a speech in Greek."
"What did he say?"
"It was all Greek to me."
My personal experience, they find it insulting. Regardless of the platitudes or wikipedia links you offer. Again, I was trying to raise awareness. My apologises for deriding the overall thread of discussion.
I would certainly be willing to do that, and the Chinese group in turn could mention some of their local analogues (because expressions depicting a foreign nation as unintelligible are found all over the world) that they don’t see as a problem – Chinese speakers are generally less concerned about ethnic sensitivities than the English-speaking world.
There is little prejudice in many of these expressions today. Certainly there may have been prejudice when the term was first coined, but the expressions then became lexicalized and speakers are not even consciously aware of them. To claim that they represent prejudice today is to fall into the etymological fallacy.
So we're left with just the fact that some anonymous wikipedia contributer says that this explanation of racist 19th century Britons has been proposed. By who? Based on what? Apparently not much. A different source I found points out that the earliest known use of the phrase in print is from March, 1964 [1]. Before that, it was known as "Russian Scandal" or "Russian Gossip". So it could hardly be the result 19th century attitudes towards the Chinese. If you're aware of any contradicting evidence, I'm happy to hear it.
Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if someone came up with the racism explanation based on simply hearing the phrase and backsolving from their gut feeling that it was obviously due to racism. Then someone put it in a Wikipedia article without checking and now you're singling out that quote as an authority that vindicates your own initial gut feeling.
[0] https://archive.org/details/chinesewhispersw0000chub/page/18...
[1] https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/chinese-whispers.html
After all, in the West schools for children as we understand them today are relatively modern inventions--not just the details (e.g. the Prussian system), but the whole notion generally. Christians historically didn't emphasize literacy as strongly as Judaism and Islam.[1] In general it was something acquired at home, and when and where schools were eventually organized they naturally had a more secular character, notwithstanding they were usually administered by clergy. Few Christians would ever conflate "church" and "school"--neither place nor function--but in some other communities (contemporary and especially historically) such distinctions are rather subtle if not empty.
[1] AFAIU, Islam always emphasized literacy as a component of religious practice. But for the first several hundred years still maintained a distinction between secular and non-secular scholarship that we would recognize today. Then a sect of Islam erasing that distinction became predominate, achieving in Islam what many Christian sects have heretofore failed to achieve despite unrelenting efforts over the millennia. (Absolutely nothing new about the religious right trying to "put god back into the classroom". It's just that Christianity as a whole, especially Western Christianity, has been an outlier in maintaining a persistent theological and practical distinction.)